An Apology from Greg

Ken Ham, the head of Answers In Genesis has called on me to publicly apologize and “retract [my] false statement” when I insinuated that he “preaches a false Gospel” by requiring “people to declare war on science as a precondition to entering the kingdom.” Ken pointed out that his organization’s Statement of Faith states that, “Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone…”

In this light, I feel I do owe Ken and anyone else I offended an apology. I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that Answers in Genesis or any other creationist organization officially teaches that a person must reject evolution and accept a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 to be saved. My comment was not directed toward anyone’s official Statement of Faith but toward the fact that creationist teaching has the effect of barring people who are convinced evolution is true from the kingdom.

I have known a number of people who could not seriously consider becoming a follower of Jesus and/or accepting the Bible to be God’s Word because they were given the impression that doing so required them to reject the entire evolutionary paradigm of contemporary science, which is something they could not do with intellectual integrity. I’ve known many others who assumed this as believers and who consequently abandoned their faith when they became convinced that aspects of evolution were well founded. In fact, one of the reasons I’m rather passionate about this is that this is precisely what happened to me as a freshmen at the University of Minnesota. I fortunately found a way of reconciling a version of the theory of evolution with confidence in Scripture as God’s Word, but untold numbers of others have not. I think this is utterly tragic.

It seems to me that the comments made about me in response to Ken’s remarks on this matter on his Facebook page confirm my claim that creationists tend to equate believing in a literal creation account with believing in the Bible. This is the mindset that my comments were intended to respond to. But again, it was never my intent to suggest that Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, or any other creationist organization “preaches a false Gospel” by officially requiring people to renouncing evolution in order to enter the kingdom. For this I sincerely apologize.